Because of its wide geographical scope and its interdisciplinary approach, DisComPoSE entails the involvement of scholars from different fields: Cultural History, Social History, History of Language, Italian and Spanish Philology, Textual Criticism, History of Art, Anthropology, and History of Science.
In order to achieve its goals, the research adopts a dual perspective:
· On the one hand, we will collect from European archives and libraries a wide-ranging corpus of narratives and images produced and disseminated in the wake of earthquakes, eruptions, floods, landslides, and droughts, that occurred in the Spanish Empire.
· On the other hand, we will investigate the ways in which news, memories and reports were converted into influential narratives of collective suffering, and how these interpretations affected the development of response policies. For this purpose, we will use the European areas as a testing ground: Catalonia, the Kingdom of Naples, Sicily and Valencia.
To ensure the success of the project, the research activities will be organized as follows:
– We will gather the large number of disaster writings (both print and manuscript) that circulated in the different territories under the Spanish Rule. These texts will be stored in a digital archive and will be processed through textual analysis, in order to identify their authors, their patrons, and their expected audiences, as well as the images and narrative techniques adopted to convey their messages.
-Then, we will study the mechanisms of information gathering and dissemination and will link the disaster writings to the groups and institutions that sponsored them.
-At the same time, some members of the research group will do a survey of the institutional actors that were involved in the recovery process;
-Then we will carry out in-depth studies of major disasters which occurred in the four selected areas, through the analysis of administrative and judicial papers.
The research activities are accompanied and supported by the transversal phases foreseen by the project (Project management, Participation in the Open Research Data Pilot, Quality control, Dissemination, Public communication).
